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Month: October 2016

Above photograph by the author. Depicts pieces in the show.

Gagosian Gallery on Madison is still showing Sally Mann – Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, and it is worth a visit. This is Mann’s homage to the late artist, a close friend and mentor from their joint hometown of Lexington, Virginia. The photographs are not exclusively posthumous tributes: she took them from 1999 through 2012, both while Twombly was still alive and during the year after. The exhibition is incredible, intimate. Mann captures his studio: ordinary objects, dirty floors, leftover supplies, scratched walls, lamps, window shades gaping just-so. The “artist” as an entity is present without ever showing his face.

At the front of the space are smaller, edgier pieces that are objective and distant from the viewer; at first, Mann does not infuse any kind of personal history into her studies. She is careful, reticent, holding back. Her connection with Twombly seemingly deepens as one proceeds further into the show; they grow closer, are “in dialogue,”per say (and I mean it). Mann seems to be talking to him through her photographs. A paradox: she grasps in vain for Twombly, but navigates her way through his sea of stuff seamlessly, comfortably. Her characteristic filmy gaze renders the works time-capsules; she presses pause and breathes it all in sensing Twombly’s mortality, reminded of the fragility of his art and her own. One becomes aware of how invested Mann is in her subjects; this exercise is rooted in her memories of him, not just in places and material things. Spaces are illuminated according to blurred choices: near-blinding clinical whites evolve into warm, homey creams. Gothic noir meets residue of human existence; Twombly’s habitat is rendered fondly in his passing. Someone was there, Mann tells us. Her works are honest; refreshing, but familiar. Vignette-like shading recalls Kathy Ryan‘s “Office Romance.” A collection of images by NY Times Magazine‘s director of photography, it is published by Aperture and absolutely stunning, a great reference point by radiating simplicity, asking readers to explore what kinds of shadows and natural designs might we encounter on a daily basis, allowing us to both escape and embrace reality. Mann’s quiet, ethereal take on Twombly’s setting is very much in the same vein. Meditating on mourning, she asks, softly: what becomes of us when we’re gone? What happens to the tangible relics and voiceless remnants of who we were that are left behind?

Remembered Light is on through October 29th. In this article, she also invokes her departed son, Emmett in explaining her preparations for the show. Transcending grief is a major focus of the exhibit, and one Mann tackles admirably.

News from Stockholm this week (I think word first appeared on Thursday) that Bob Dylan would be this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature was met with much media buzz. Critics debated: is he– a poet or bard, at best– deserving of the esteemed Prize? Does Dylan hold a candle to past recipients; is he a prosaic match for Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Many, like Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, embrace his anointment (after all, the publication’s epithet is, in part, a Dylan homage). They celebrate his uniquely American scope, the possibilities Dylan brought to music as a genre and a form and his endless, Picasso-like ability to reinvent himself, stemming from his intimate knowledge and vocalization of the frustratingly familiar. The award even begs the question: does the Nobel Committee listen to the NY Times (given an Op-Ed piece from 2013, though it veers into cynical paranoia to consider whether yet another feted institution has become a partisan progressive mouthpiece, despite a reasonable supporting argument)? Well, either way, the NY Times contradicted itself in referring to him. And then again, kind of, ending one of its write-ups, unsurprisingly, with President Obama’s Dylan endorsement.

Each editorial outdoes the other in showering praise on the singer-songwriter of 75 years or burying him in scathing criticism. It is as if the Nobel Committee decided 2016 was barren enough journalistic territory that, for fun, it should throw a match at the press and watch it fan its own self-righteous flames. One wonders whether Stockholm is having a laugh at the vast levels of Dylan-driven contention spanning the internet’s expanse, then remembers that the Swedish are notoriously dark-humored: is this whole affair a polished exercise in sadism?

For a moment after I heard what happened thoughts like these materialized, exorcised speedily through the imaginary balloon above my head. Then I took to Twitter. “Hey, this is news,” I wrote concerning the announcement, redundant in the narratorial spirit of the medium. In shorthand: “And remember when Dylan collab’d with Gagosian?” I linked a review of 2011’s The Asia Series, aDylan show at the famous gallery, also besought by much-covered controversy. The viewer cannot knowingly deny the parallels between his paintings and famous photographs of the Orient, despite Dylan’s defensive statements to the contrary: “I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that… I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start with something tangible.” According to Politico, his 2012 exhibit– entitled Revisionist Art: Thirty Works by Bob Dylan– in attempts to overshadow or transcend the plagiarist flavor of its antecedent by riffing on Americana such as Babytalk magazine covers, for which Dylan has a soft-spot, an almost nostalgic penchant. Here, too, the oeuvre of notorious borrower artist Elaine Sturtevant, who received a retrospective at MoMA relatively recently, comes to mind.

The thing is that, unlike some ArtsBeat assignees, I don’t really care whether Dylan’s pieces are cheap or dull imitations or blatant copies. Even Chuck Close, great portraitist of our times, models his work on photographs. Another oils novice, Bush II, was not any more inventive than Dylan, clumsily drawing on results from Google Image search for his portraits of world leaders, with whom he was in personal, often fleshly, contact during his tenure in office. Rather, I am referencing this facet of Dylan’s career to spark a dialogue, much in the same vein as that about his Noble Prize in Literature, regarding the merits of having more than one finger in more than one creative pot. I could start spewing facts and figures about various cultural icons who have followed this path, or tell you to read “I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus,in many respects devoted to the subject of aesthetic interconnectivity, the bridging of the intellectual with the experiential and sensual, and what got me considering the quandary of the artist as a multi-hyphenate in the first place. Instead, I open it up to you, dear readers. This time, it’s me that’sasking: do you think Bob Dylan should be recognized for more than one thing, or heralded under the broad characterization of the literary arts, when he’s dabbled in other stuff, too (even sculpture, as of late)? To what extent is his sideshow a perpetuation of his whole act, and to what extent should it be divorced from his folksy protest anthems? Dylan is a case study, a test-run or microcosm of a large-scale issue that weaves the legacies of video art, performance art, slam poetry, and a thousand other movements, with their contexts and attached personalities. If 2016, year of newly discovered fluidity (between genders, especially), can be rebranded by 1964’s Times’ They Are A Changin’, maybe our approach of benign-neglect to how we look at innovators in numerous fields– e.g. through the singular lens of what they pioneer, rather than what they lightly toy with– should be, too.

Artist of the Month (October)

Frederic Edwin Church

Heart of the Andes(1859) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright belongs to the Museum 2016.

Ah, the Hudson River School, capturing the literal nature of what it means to be one with the world from 1825 through 1870! I recently saw this Romantic (capital ‘R’) Church painting, as well as a whole host of others in the same tradition, under the bright, promising lights of the Met‘s American Wing, a rediscovered favorite. In all likelihood, you will not get an accurate sense of the breadth of Church’s masterpiece (it spans 10 feet)– nor that of his mentor Thomas Cole‘s equally stunning and beloved work, View from Mount Holyoke– from the above photo. It deserves a trip to the Museum, a pilgrimage of sorts. But why Church to begin with? Who was he? What do we know about him besides the fact that he made really large and intricate pieces? (more…)

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MolaPola was founded in the spring of 2014 by Moselle Kleiner as a way of chronicling her ongoing exploration of museums, galleries, and art shows around the globe. As of 2017, the site concentrates on bringing fresh perspectives to art world issues. Thank you for visiting MolaPola! Please note that images and writing belongs to Moselle Kleiner unless otherwise specified.